His gaze was filled with the embers’ light, with incredulity. “I did not refuse. I said I needed time.”

“I’ll be tortured.” My words caught on tears. “I’ll be given to Evander’s men for them to do what they please before they slash my throat.”

The silence sat like pins in my skin. It eked out until he finally deigned to speak. I would have preferred spiteful words, a curse dripping with disdain, anything at all besides the complete lack of emotion that he gave me instead. “That’s what happens to murderers in a place like this.”

My chest ached with the weight of my hopelessness, but still, I wouldn’t leave without at least trying to make him understand. “He deserved it,” I spat. “Had I been married and bound to him it would have been me that died. He would have sucked the life from me, one small cruelty at a time.”

I scooted toward the edge of the bed. I left the blanket behind, and shivered as I moved toward the door. Death loomed just beyond, and I wondered if I should wait for it in my room, or if I should go out in search of it. Perhaps it would be better to trek out toward the fort’s guards, wings wide, and suffer a quick death from an arrow to the heart.

“Stop.” Theodore blew out a long breath and rose. His white sleep shirt was askew and rumpled, stopping just above his knees. A flinty look filled his eyes, but his voice was softer than I’d ever heard it. “Come away from the door.” His gaze darted quickly down my body before he picked up the blanket and tossed it at me. “Keep this on you, Gods damn it.”

When I finally had the blanket secure around me, he came nearer. He stood close, enveloping me in a wave of warmth. “What’s this?” He reached out and grazed a finger over a sore spot on my chin.

I winced at the pain. “From my darling fiancé’s siphon, I’d guess.”

“It’s bleeding.” He shook his head regretfully. “I’ve told you, helping you now will start a war.”

“Yes, I know.” Hot tears rolled freely down my cheeks. “I’m not an imbecile, contrary to what you believe. I understand the repercussions. I understand why you are sending me away to my death—”

He swiped a hand down his face. “Shut up, please.”

“What?”

“Shut up.” He moved to cradle my face in his hands so quickly that I gasped. “I’m fixing this.” He tilted my head back, thrusting my bloody chin forward and, with an angry glower, using his bright power to close the cut.

He finished quickly, his heat there and gone, but neither of us moved for a drawn-out moment after.

His hands finally fell from my face. “Were you truly going to bind us?” he asked in a strangely even voice.

“Yes.” I locked my gaze with his. “I am tired of being diminished.” I stepped toward the door. “But you were right, I’m too cowardly to save myself—”

“Do it.”

“I beg your—”

“Bind us,” he said. “A war with Nemea is unavoidable. He cannot be allowed to commit one atrocity after another. It’s not ideal to start it with the death of his captain and the stealing of his ward, but I believe… I believe it’s preferable to the alternative.”

My mouth hung open. “The alternative being my death.”

“Yes. So, I agree to our binding.”

“But why?”

“There’s no divine or earthly way that I would get anywhere near a ship with you unless I was immune to your lure.”

My face flushed. “That’s fair.”

“There are three conditions.”

“Of course.” I sucked in a shaky breath as wariness surged. “What are they?”

“You denounce Nemea, and you swear fealty to me as your new king. Then, when we arrive in Varya, you go directly to the Mage Seer and have our blood bond severed in a ritual there.”

It wasn’t lost on me that he could ask me to remove my own hand and feed it to his dog while smiling and I’d say yes. “I can do that.” I waited cautiously for the final condition. Theodore was a shrewd king, with a gaze like razors, and a mind just as sharp. He would require something of me, something far greater than my bending a knee and trekking to sever our bond. “The third?”

He began to rummage through a trunk at the end of the bed. Out came dark trousers, a white shirt. He bent toward the hearth and set some logs atop the smoldering embers. “When you return from the Mage Seer,” he said, “you will complete one task of my choosing.”

A warning bell tolled through me. One task of his choosing. I watched with a wary gaze as he dug through the trunk again. He checked papers, other small items shoved between the clothes, and I realized he was deciding what to burn. We’d be leaving too quickly for him to bring along his effects. “What’s the task?” I asked carefully.

He avoided my gaze. “I don’t know yet.” He threw a small stack of papers into the fire and then began to pull on his trousers. “Quickly, my lady, your hair is drying. Your wings will shrivel up next and we’ll have lost our opportunity.” He began to remove his sleep shirt, and I looked toward the door. “Do you agree to my conditions?”

By every marker of what was fair, I should have. I should have fallen to my knees and kissed his warm fingers for being willing to cut himself open and tie us together. And if he asked that I risk my life, my safety, the prospect of a home of my own, I should say gladly. The king looked at me with disbelief, as if he could not understand my pause, and I thought: He has never known what it is to exist purely for the use of others.

The thought of submitting to the open-ended whims of yet another king, of owing obedience, of not being wholly my own, choked me with despair.

“I am willing to put my life in danger,” he fumed, “to jeopardize the well-being of my kingdom, so that you can leave this place safely—”

His words landed like a spark on dead grass. They lit my mind with a dreadful realization. No good and fair and just king—no king who was duty-bound to his core—would do something this foolish. A king as virtuous and powerful as Theodore would let me, an orphaned ward of a vicious and lowly king, die here because his reign demanded it. Of course, he might feel the barest prick of guilt to deny me, he might even be so soft as to lament the loss of a young woman who had so wished to live, but he would not do this.

“Your decision, Lady Imogen?”

In the firelight, he looked as hard and imposing as a statue. Shadows tucked themselves beneath his golden-brown cheekbone, into the hollow of his neck and the furrow of his brow. I could see the shape of his ancestor in him. The Great God Panos had been strong and indominable too. He needed nothing from me. And I had nothing to give. But I thought of him in Nemea’s ritual room, spun through with fury over my blood. He’d told me with surety, I do know you.

Who do you think I am?

Suddenly, I wondered if this lopsided favor was perhaps perfectly balanced.

“I agree to your conditions, Your Majesty.” I tilted my chin up. “But if you prove untrustworthy, so help me, once our bond is severed, I will—”

Theodore cocked his head. “Are you threatening me?”

“I have little reason to trust men who say they will do right by me in exchange for my obedience.” I’d grown so cold, so weary, that the words came out in one pathetic, trembling breath.

He raised his brows, conceding my point. “Let’s do this before you accidentally kill me.”

I lowered myself into the warmth rolling out of the hearth. Theodore didn’t join me. He strode to the door, glowered at me, and said, “Keep your blanket on.” Then he brought the three guards in, one by one. Each took me in with alarm and Theodore gave them a searing look. “Where’s Commander Mela?”

His commander. Agatha’s commander. All the men held themselves still, their faces unreadable, until finally one of them looked ashamedly to the floor. “He told us to cover his post.” There was a heavy pause. “He went to meet a woman.”